A Life Story rather than a Love Story

Jun27

Sally Minogue reviews the National Theatre’s touring production of 'Jane Eyre'

Sally Cookson, the director and key shaper of this
adaptation of Charlotte Brontë’s best known novel, places the emphasis of this
production very clearly: ‘I like to think of it as a Life story rather than a
Love story (the original title was Jane
Eyre – an Autobiography) which sees Jane develop from a powerless child
into an independent free-thinking adult’. A bildungsroman
for the theatre, then, in which the emphasis is on the progress of Jane’s life
through different experiences, places, and stages, in each of which her contact
with one important other transforms her in some way. That schema underpins this
touring version of Jane Eyre, which started
life at the Bristol Old Vic as a two-part adaptation of the novel, and was then
distilled ‘into a single event’ for the National Theatre.

The NT website (https://www.nationaltheatre.org.uk/shows/jane-eyre-on-tour)
offers some brief videos on various aspects of the way this production was
conceived and developed. While they are
intended mainly for schools – obviously one of the target audiences for this
play – these behind-the-scenes films are illuminating for the general viewer.
Certainly they gave me a better understanding of Cookson’s method, which is to
work from a carefully cast ensemble of actors, with ‘everyone in the room’
contributing ideas to the devising of the production (using their reading of
the novel as the jumping off point). Movement and music in particular are seen
as key components in telling the story. Collaboration between actors, director,
designers and musicians is an egalitarian process – and I suppose Charlotte
Brontë is in there somewhere as a collaborator too.

Interestingly, the dramaturg listed in the programme
credits (Mike Akers) makes no appearance in these explanatory films, and that
is indicative. In this style of theatre, in which the devising of the action
produces the script rather than the other way round, mood, kinetic energy,
visual dynamism, balletic interaction and above all music, are more important
theatrical tools than the word. Music is placed centrally to the action by
having the three-man band right in the middle of the set, with the players
being genuinely players – for example, dressed as orphans in the Lowood
section. The music, most of it originally composed, was a driving force, and
the presence of it mid-action felt genuinely unforced. However, where singing
was used as a vehicle for furthering the plot or providing an emotional
undercurrent, the inability to make out specific lyrics was a barrier. When the
words were clear, or familiar, as in the witty use of Noel Coward’s ‘Mad About
the Boy’ as Jane falls helplessly for Rochester, the device worked, though
persistent echoes of the gay subtext of Coward’s lyrics might not have been
intended. [For an enjoyable rendition by Tom Robinson of some of Coward’s
original lyrics, including the immortal lines ‘I know that quite sincerely
/Housman really wrote / The Shropshire Lad about the boy’, go to https://tomrobinson.bandcamp.com/track/mad-about-the-boy]

This was, then, a production full of energy. Not for
nothing were warnings posted at the entrances to the auditorium: pyrotechnics;
loud noises; smoke; strobe lighting. As an audience, we were primed. One major
advantage of this approach was that one always felt, even in the miserable
midst of the scenes at Lowood, the intense energy in Jane herself. And while we
see this being tamed or at least turned inwards, that process is managed by
Jane in response to the experiences she meets. Nadia Clifford (replacing, on
this tour, the original creator of the role, Madeleine Worrall) was remarkable,
emerging from the rebellious child-Jane into the corseted teacher-Jane, then at
Thornfield becoming her fully feeling self under the heat of Rochester’s gaze
(and almost shedding that corset), then leaving that heat behind for the
desolation of a journey that finally brings her to her true independent self,
ready to return to fulfilment in passionate love and marriage, but within an
equalised relationship. In Rochester one could see the distinct shadow of Orson
Welles (not a bad shadow to have) – Cookson acknowledges the influence of the
1943 film, which she saw well before she read the novel. [See my previous blog on film versions of Jane Eyre here] This relationship was
fully felt, and while this is above all an ensemble production, it’s no use
denying that the relationship between Jane and Rochester stands at the centre
of any adaptation of the novel.

Against its own precept (more Life story than Love story), the production seems
to endorse this centrality, closing the circle with the birth of a baby, rather
than keeping it open. Here the drama follows the convention of the
nineteenth-century fiction: marriage is the only happy ending, and, as in the
novel, one cannot help but feel that Jane’s fine fighting spirit is subsumed by
society in the end. But another way of seeing it is that she can, finally,
accept her own personal happiness precisely because she has previously put her
own sense of self before it. Jane’s suffering is cleverly portrayed through the
motif of running; each journey is a marathon, a physical and mental test
endured by the whole ensemble, loudly, painfully, effortfully, but always
longest and furthest by Jane herself. Another motif is that of the framed
window, sometimes doubling as a mirror. Jane looks out to a world beyond, but
at the same time she looks at her own reflection and is driven further inwards;
sometimes she breaks the frame, and sometimes she is held within it. These
visual clues and cues are memorable, and sometimes they lift into true
theatricality, as when Jane seems to fly on a wind created by her fellow cast
members.

My readers may sense a but. I can best explain that but by reference to another
adaptation – a translation in its strictest sense, Alexander Pope’s
eighteenth-century translation of Homer’s Iliad.
Dr. Johnson tells us that the classical
scholar Richard Bentley commented. ‘It is a pretty poem, Mr. Pope, but you must
not call it Homer’. Maybe, like any translation from one language to another,
an adaptation of a novel for the theatre can never do justice to the original
fiction – the genres are too different. However,
I’ve recognised elsewhere that an adaptation which seems extraordinarily far
from the original can capture its true spirit (see my review of West Yorkshire
Playhouse’s re-imagined, futuristic Villette
in 2016here). My objection to this Jane Eyre
is rather that it over-simplifies a complex narrative, shapes it too roundly,
reduces each of her journeys to the same sort of thing by the repeated device
of running, and often flattens rather than expands Jane’s internal journey (as
in her three-day trek into the wilderness when she leaves Thornfield). We miss,
powerfully, the sense of landscape which imaginatively informs the novel,
especially in that dark period of the soul where Jane struggles to keep her
sense of self alive, and where nature is both her comforter and feeder (she
eats bilberries, ‘gleaming ... like jet beads in the heath’ and takes rest on
the heath with ‘a low, mossy swell’ as her pillow), but also her tormentor, its
beauty taunting her suffering. (Chapter 28)

As these brief quotations remind us, we miss most of all Brontë’s
words. When they were used, as in the
desolate Bewick conjurings of the wildly imaginative child-Jane at Gateshead,
or in Jane’s impassioned declaration up on the leads that ‘women feel just as
men feel’, or in the intimate exchanges between Rochester and Jane at
Thornfield, and between Jane and the dying Aunt Reed, the play came alight.
Elsewhere, shorthand was used to cover exchanges or to convey a central idea
(Helen Burns describing herself as passive, for example), or words were
by-passed altogether at significant moments, in keeping with the production’s
central technique. I personally missed
iconic phrases, which could so easily have been included. The significant
opening line of the novel, ‘There was no possibility of taking a walk that day’
(which ushers in Jane’s dwelling in the world of books and her own
imagination), was sacrificed for a long drawn out depiction of Jane’s birth and
orphaning. Similarly as we drew to the ending, there was no ‘Reader, I married
him’, which might easily have been incorporated to allow Jane to share her
satisfaction and fulfilment with the audience. It could have been done
ironically, if desired.

My 15-year old companion, who had recently re-read Jane Eyre, brought a fresh, youthful and
acute eye to the proceedings. In her view, some of the most significant
elements or scenes in the novel had been omitted – for example, the scene in
which Rochester dresses up as a gipsy to foretell Jane’s future, where his
teasing subterfuge attempts to draw her out into an admission of her feelings.
Another key omission, this time a narrative one, was that of Jane’s inheritance
from her uncle, which frees her from any future dependence of the kind that
Rochester might have exerted. Certainly, it would have been difficult to
include or explain the narrative ironies of this legacy in this fast-flowing
drama. In the novel, there is a careful concatenation of events, starting with
Aunt Reed’s summoning of Jane and revealing that her uncle has written to seek
her in order to make her his heir, but has been told by Aunt Reed that Jane is
dead. When Rochester heaps riches on Jane prior to their intended marriage, she
is so uncomfortable that she writes to her uncle in the hope of bringing her
own inheritance into the marriage. This letter, by extreme coincidence, alerts
Richard Mason, Bertha’s brother, to Rochester’s intended marriage to Jane – and
brings him to interrupt the marriage ceremony, leading Jane to flee. Only after
she has sought her personal independence does that inheritance allow her to
return to Rochester on an even footing. As the very length of these explanatory
sentences shows, this is not the sort of complex information that can be
conveyed theatrically; and even in the body of the novel its intricacies may
escape readers. However, the fact of the inheritance itself is crucial to
Jane’s personal independence, the final step in her very own Life story. Only
after that can she readily, happily announce, ‘Reader I married him’.

Any adaptation of Jane
Eyre has to grapple with the representation of Bertha Mason. Here Bertha is
graphically placed from the start both as alter ego and powerful counterpoint
to the frail figure of Jane, reminding us always of that larger, more powerful
other that Jane could become. All well and good. But in this otherwise colour
blind production, Bertha is played by a black actor/singer Melanie Marshall (who
also carries the musical/lyrical line alongside the play’s action – she it is
who sings ‘Mad About the Boy’). Brontë
leaves the ethnic origins of Bertha as ambiguous, saying only that her mother
was Creole, which can be used in a Caribbean context to indicate mixed race,
but can also indicate simply born of a European settler. And there is no
suggestion of mixed race in her brother Richard. But in using a black actor, Bertha is
depicted as the black side of Jane’s whiteness, endorsing the one great flaw in
Brontë’s novel, where Bertha’s appetites are ‘othered’ while Jane’s are made
acceptable by being contained. Wouldn’t it have made more sense to use a white
actor to play Bertha, thus counteracting any possible implications of Bertha’s
race being allied with her madness?
Caught between two stools, the production is uncomfortable with the
depiction of Bertha. Instead of rending Jane’s wedding veil in two and then
stamping on it, she floats it about a bit, thus missing the visual drama of her
pre-visioning and pre-empting Jane’s loss of virginity. Her attack on her
brother Richard is toned down – in the novel she tears into his shoulder with
her teeth, but not here. Conversely, Jane is shown uncompromisingly biting John
Reed. But these are difficult waters. At least this production gives Bertha a
powerful voice, providing the musical and lyrical line throughout the
production. ‘Reader, I married him’ – words that Bertha had the right to speak
as well as Jane; but in this theatrical devising of Brontë’s fiction, as well
as in the novel itself, it is Jane who tells the tale.

A final footnote: I have to end with the tail wagging the
dog. This production has quite the most brilliant depiction of a dog –
Rochester’s Pilot – a human actor (Paul Mundell) could ever produce. Faithful, ever
wagging, ever ready to be happy, optimistic, watchful for what his master might
want, on the qui vive, flopped down exhausted but still on the qui vive,
delightedly responding to being scratched and caressed – a dog extraordinaire.
I suppose it’s not the best recommendation, but honestly, it’s worth going just
to see the dog.